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In 1907 Britain signed an agreement with China, undertaking to phase out all opium exports from India, over a ten-year period, provided that China’s suppression of its domestic drug industry met similar annual targets. Many British colonial officials assumed, no doubt, that China would fail to meet its targets, thereby giving them an excuse to resume exports from India. But, in the event, China disappointed them by actually exceeding its targets.” In some regions, like Sichuan, conscientious officials succeeded in almost eliminating opium in just four years. China’s crusade to free her people from the opium curse,’ wrote a contemporary American observer, may be justly reckoned one of the greatest moral achievements in history, a challenge to our Western world.

The Sino-British accord of 1907 was a turning point in the evolution of an international regulatory framework for opium, which proceeded apace over the next few years. In 1911 the Patna Opium Factory was shut down, and the acreage under poppy cultivation in India was greatly reduced. Within a few years the Sino-Indian opium relationship had effectively ended. Although the process was disrupted by World War I the anti-opium movement was strong enough by then to ensure that the cause would be taken up again- and the League of Nations did indeed treat it as a major priority. By the mid-1920s this regulatory framework was securely in place, with severe restrictions on the export of opium from India. In 1930 legislation was introduced to strictly control the circulation of opium within the Indian subcontinent (although in a contradictory move, the colonial regime also opened the Neemach Opium Factory in 1935).”

Needless to add, the establishment of the global regulatory framework for opium did not succeed in putting the genie back in the bottle: far from it. In the 1920s and 1930s, as Japan seized more and more Chinese territory, it abandoned the policies it had followed in Taiwan and became deeply involved in drug trafficking itself, continuing through World War II. Immediately after the War, opium played an important part in financing the anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam. In Indonesia, similarly, the infant independent republic was forced to sell leftover stocks of the colonial regime’s opium in order to fund its fight against the Dutch, from 1945 to 1949.

Excerpted from Pages 314 to 315 of Smoke And Ashes: A Journey Through Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh